Transferable Skills
Retirement, it turns out, needs transferable skills…just like your day job! While I might be closer to a decision about “pulling the pin” than I was when I wrote, “Is Retiring Like Quitting Sugar”; I have yet to set an actual date. However, I continue with my on-going research and conversations, about what to do when I retire. And that’s proving to be both enlightening and entertaining. I’m inching toward hitting “send” on the “I’m retiring email”. Today I thought I’d share a piece of that “research” with you. I’ve learned that certain skill sets are just as handy on the job as they are off.
Adaptability & Learning on the Fly
Adaptability and the ability to learn on the fly. Skill sets that weren’t top of mind when I started dreaming of retiring. The closest I got to wanting to learn something new came when I started thinking about how many languages I would need to know how to order a glass of wine in. (And honestly, right now the answer is four!) The ability to travel will return eventually!
“I’d like a glass of wine please.”
- “Je voudrais un verre de vin s’il vous plaît.” French
- “Ich möchte bitte ein Glas Wein.” German
- “Vorrei un bicchiere di vino, per favore.” Italian
- “Me gustaría una copa de vino por favor.” Spanish
But instead of, “vorrei un bicchiere di vino, per favore”, I’m learning techie things. I thought, oh sure, I like to write. I’ve had a few articles published over the years; I’ll blog, how hard can that be? Hard! The writing skill set was the one that I thought would be the most transferable. Turns out, adaptability, and the ability to learn on the fly, are the ones most important for me lately. I’m grateful to be a lifelong learner. If I needed to acquire these new skillsets/habits as a person who never embraced education, I’d be totally lost!
Google & Icebergs
For example, I spent this week learning JSON, a coding language for structured data. In non-nerd, that means learning the language that helps Google, and other SEOs, interpret readable text. I thought I was going to be the cool granny simply because I knew that SEO stood for search engine optimization; turns out…I’m not that cool! SEO is the tip of the proverbial iceberg!
The more I learn about blogging, the more I realize how little I know. Being able to compose a sentence without double negating the expletive and dangling my participles is the simple part. First, I had to create a web page for my blog, so that I could publish my posts. Factoid I didn’t know, I thought all my musings were blogs.
Nope, posts are the musings, the blog is where people go to read them. So, since January, I’ve been learning to create my own blog site. I found Bluehost thanks to John Chow and his blog tutelage. I used them as my web hosting service. Their service comes with WordPress as the creative tool. John Chow said, “it’s easy, you can do it all by yourself”. Yikes, found out quick, it’s really not that easy John! But all it took was a bit of competent help from Blue Host and Blue Sky, some trial and error, and then I actually did learn to do it myself.
I learned, as an example, how to use structured blocks to create a more attractive and readable page. Once I got the hang of it, the creative process is actually a great deal of fun! That part taught me how to make it look swanky and be readable on the people side. I was patting myself on the back for all that I had absorbed. Oh look at me. Aren’t I clever! Now I can go back to my comfort zone…writing. Yahoo!
Circle back to realizing how little I really know! Unbeknownst to me, it’s not just people that need to be able to read my posts…on my blog…on the interwebs! Being read and understood by Google is a totally necessary and equally important. Had to adapt my thinking to a broader social media mindset. Started to learn about plugins; and how to use them to add unique pieces to my posts. The plugins helped improve my visual appeal…for those four or five gracious family members that read my posts. Other plugins made my posts more attractive to Google (not a gracious family member).
Yoast is my new best friend
Next on the learning curve? I found out about Yoast. Everyone should learn about Yoast! It’s a plugin for search engine optimization; and it’s a tool to help you make your website as “findable” as possible. And it uses tags, and slugs, and meta-tags. I said I learned it, I didn’t say I could explain it!
My goal is to have my blog site show up on page one of Google’s search results. Or Bing. Or what ever your favorite is. Being new to all of this, I’m almost certain that my posts will show up on page 860! Yoast also helps with my editing, and it helps you create the best headlines. Lots! I have learned way more than I ever thought I’d need, and I’ve loved every minute of it.
Full Disclosure
And, full disclosure, any of these people or services that I’ve mentioned, like Bluehost or WordPress, or John Chow, are not paid endorsements. Sincerely, I’m just sharing how I got this far. Learning to sift through the endless options that the internet has to offer has been a marathon, just to “get this far.”
Learning that you don’t have to pay for everything to make your site/blog Google friendly was a big deal. Everyone knows that virtually every website is trying to sell you something. But there’s thousands of freebies on-line. I learned on the fly (and sometimes gullibly) how to sort the wheat from the chaff. Learning that little trick of the trade…big epiphany!
Here’s one of those cool free finds. Schema.org – it takes some time to learn and use, but it’s super helpful for all those bits of code that Google prefers to read. I’m not gonna lie, I’ve had to do a lot of reading (just like the day job) to understand this stuff. I’m new to all this; and social media doesn’t come intuitively to me… I did catch on to it after I practiced and muddled around with it. It makes sense, more or less!
To bounce or not to bounce
Finally, learning to create popular, readable blogs is more than just the use of info-taining words, a good story, and some code bits and bytes. It’s about the ability to hold a busy person’s attention with my blog; and the ability to quantify it. It’s about your engagement with my blog. Your engagement with my posts is measured with a “bounce rate”. Seriously, I thought a bounce rate was how you gauged the effectiveness of a sports bra. But apparently, it’s integral to both sports’ lingerie and social media engagement. It reflects how long a reader spends on my blog site or page. The more time a reader spends interacting in some way – reading, looking at pictures, filling a form is obviously a good and quantifiable thing. No blogger wants a reader to just skim their site; we want you to pop in, stay awhile, get comfortable. Not just say hi and bounce out quickly. Hence, “bounce rate”. High bounce rates bad, low bounce rates good…hey, perhaps it is like a sports bra! Come on, who doesn’t love a good sports bra analogy!
I’m sure that over time, I will find countless more transferable skills that will be helpful…when I “pull the pin” …stay tuned!
Cynthia Ross Tustin retired early to pursue her passion for writing. Turns out, she's equally passionate about retirement! This author has spent 1000s of hours researching all the best that retirement has to offer. What you'll find here is a well-curated resource of amazing places to go and fun things to do as your retirement approaches. Not retired, no problem! There's plenty here for all of us that are "of a certain vintage"!